"I Know What You Did Last Summer"

★ (1 out of 4)

Horror movies and summer make a great team. Who doesn’t feel the rush and tingly chill of hitting the multiplex with friends and screaming bloody murder together (bring your own weed) while watching a scary movie? “I Know What You Did Last Summer” was too mediocre to pull it off in 1997. Critics yawned as expected, but the slasher flick stayed No.1 at the box office for three weeks, grossed $125 million, spawned a 1998 sequel called (Weren’t they clever?) “I Still Know What You Did Last Summer,”  a straight-to-video, stand alone 2006 followup dubbed (still clever?) “I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer,” then a Prime Video TV series in 2021, and now this.

 Exhausting, right?  The new version, a piss-poor reboot, doesn’t even bother to screw with the title. It’s plain old “I Know What You Did Last Summer," barely updating the plot about a handful of teen friends who are stalked by a hook-wielding killer fisherman one year after covering up a car accident in which they maybe killed a dude. Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze, Jr., two stars of the original, return for this one, but they’ve aged out of teen roles and play themselves as they are today. I do recall that Kevin Williamson, who’d written his legendary horror comedy, “Scream,” just the year before, played this one straight with a moral squint that showed the teens traumatized by guilt. Bummer.

The new “I Know,” directed by Jennifer Kaytin Robinson from a lame script she co-wrote with Sam Lansky, defines rudimentary. We’re back in the coastal town of Southport, North Carolina, where the first film took place. There’s an engagement party going on for bride-to-be Danica (Madelyn Cline), groom Teddy (Tyriq Withers), and besties Ava (Chase Sui Wonders) and Milo (Jonah Hauer-King). The bill is being footed by the groom’s daddy Grant (Billy Campbell), a real-estate tycoon who’s in denial about the bloody massacre that took place back in the day. No wonder, murder is quite the buzz kill.

No signs yet of the fisherman with the hook who got blood over everything. There are too many other things going on for these spoiled rich kids, joined for reasons later made shockingly clear by the working class Stevie (a frisky Sarah Pidgeon), whose family committed the cardinal sin of going broke. Just when you think the movie may be taking a right turn into originality, the script decides to repeat exactly what happened the first time.

There’s an obstruction on the road, inadvertently caused by the pretty young privileged brats, which triggers the driver of a pickup truck to swerve over the guardrail. The brats actually try to save him, but no luck. It’s back to staging a coverup and pretending it never happened.

[T]he real horror is seeing slasher movies that aren’t worth a damn in the first place...

Have slasher movies taught nothing to impressionable youth? Cut to a year later, when the fisherman with the hook does return and the survivors start receiving notes reminding everyone that so-and-so knows what they did last summer. 

Really? That’s it? Pretty much. Robinson does her best to turn the bloodbaths into a whodunit. But the reveal of the killer(s) seems annoyingly out of character. I hate it when that happens. It helps to see Love Hewitt turn up as Julie James, a survivor of the previous carnage who seems to have learned nothing from the experience. Ditto Prinze as her ex-husband Ray who’s still reeling from the trauma of his past. Another star of the original films also cameos, but I’ll save that surprise since there are so few of them in the actual movie.

Everyone  seems understandably numbed by the end, especially the audience who must think that the real horror is seeing slasher movies that weren’t worth a damn in the first place being recycled on a continuous loop for all eternity.  For this moviegoer that will stand as the definition of hell, at least until the next reboot comes along.